A few days ago, Mike Davis, a former clerk for Justice Neil
Gorsuch and chief counsel for nominations on the Senate Judiciary Committee, posted a racist
diatribe on X offering to pay for “bitching minorities” to move to another
country. He also offered to cover their living expenses if they renounced their
citizenship and left, which he said that they would need thanks to “that nappy-ass
head of hair.”

Dear Bitching Minorities:

Here’s my proposal for your reparations:

One-way tickets anywhere.

6 months of living expenses.

Renounce your U.S. citizenship.

Never come back.

Good luck.

You’ll need it.

(Especially with that nappy-ass head of hair.) https://t.co/JN5Y75maOF

— 🇺🇸 Mike Davis 🇺🇸 (@mrddmia) September 6, 2026

His rant made me think of a different group of people in the
United States, one that would happily take that offer if it meant permanent
residency in a country not actively desiring their eradication.

The Trump administration and those in its orbit have made it
clear that transgender people need to be eradicated for America to be great
again. Trump has effectively promised to eliminate transgender people given the
chance. He said on Fox News that if
Republicans do not retain control of the House and Senate in the midterms, “transgender
will never end.” The implication of course is that if Republicans do retain
control, it will end.

Elon Musk has similarly vowed to destroy the community, as
vengeance for his
estranged transgender daughter, Vivian. “The reason they call it
‘deadnaming’ is because your son is dead, killed by the woke mind virus,” he
said. “I vowed to destroy the woke mind virus after that, and we’re making some
progress.”

Project
2025 explicitly called for making it illegal to be transgender, or to even
discuss being transgender, the First Amendment be damned. In the project’s executive
summary, the Heritage Foundation blueprint for the Trump administration
declared: “Pornography, manifested today in the omnipresent propagation of
transgender ideology … has no claim to First Amendment protection.… Pornography
should be outlawed. The people who produce and distribute it should be
imprisoned.”

To that end, the Trump administration has pursued a
host of policies targeting transgender people as a group. These policies
have direct parallels to Nazi Germany’s targeting of Jews, homosexuals, and
people with disabilities between 1933
and 1938. For example, transgender
people have been banned from the military, banned from access to government
health care, banned from public facilities, and banned from all sports, right
down to chess
tournaments. Similarly, the Supreme Court found that while “gender
expression” might be a protected characteristic, a diagnosis
of gender dysphoria is not, meaning that the government can target
transgender people for direct discrimination on the flimsiest of excuses.

More recently, the Trump and MAHA-dominated National Institutes
of Health published a non–peer
reviewed “study” attempting to prove that support for transgender people leads
to political violence and terrorism. This follows the September 2025 National
Security Presidential Memorandum-7, or NSPM-7, titled “Countering
Domestic Terrorism and Organized Political Violence,” which named “radical
gender ideology” as a domestic terrorism threat indicator. And just to add
to the danger, Republican House members Nancy
Mace and Ronny
Jackson have called for all transgender people to be rounded up and
forcibly institutionalized.

These calls to label transgender people as violently
mentally ill  terrorists is part of a coordinated
misinformation campaign, one that has been picked up and amplified by
the most prominent “independent” voices in media, such as Joe
Rogan, who called transgender people “fucking perverts” and (falsely) accused
them of being responsible for most school shootings.

All of this animus is focused on a group of people in grave
danger of being targeted and potentially confined by the federal government. This is why the Williams Institute at UCLA found that,
given the opportunity in December 2024, 45 percent of transgender people in the
United States would leave the country if they could. Almost two years later, with the situation deteriorating even
more, it seems likely that this number is significantly higher today. It
doesn’t help that Democrats are increasingly willing to sell out their transgender constituents to the
people who want to eradicate them in the name of political expediency.

However, the barriers to
immigration are formidable. Most countries that have legal protections for
transgender people are clamping down on immigration, as xenophobia sweeps the West and buoys fascist movements globally. Similarly, most countries legally define
the United States as a “safe” country for LGBT people and therefore are rejecting attempts by
transgender Americans to claim asylum. In short: Transgender Americans perceive
the danger, even while the rest of the world is too busy dealing with all the
other irrational and disruptive things Trump and the GOP are doing to
understand the peril that trans people are in.

Here’s an idea: Canada would
like to end the trade war with the U.S. without having to effectively hand over sovereignty to Trump. Canada also has a desperate need for skilled young workers, particularly those in medical professions,
transport, and to serve in the military.

At the same time, the Trump
administration is attempting to separate thousands of qualified transgender
members of the military and giving them discharge codes that guarantee they will never be able to work in the defense industry again.

The logic is simple: The
United States wants transgender people to go away and would encourage them to
emigrate. Canada wants to end the tariff wars, and its ability to take transgender
people off the hands of the U.S. government may be a potential
bargaining chip. Transgender people can read the writing on the wall: If they
don’t flee, something very, very bad is likely to happen to them if the GOP
holds onto power.

There is a historical
precedent to this concept. During the early years of the Third Reich, the Nazi
government actively encouraged to Jews to emigrate. It worked with Jewish
organizations to liquidate Jewish assets and transfer the proceeds to them in
Palestine as part of the Haavara Agreement. Similarly, in
the aftermath of Kristallnacht, when 30,000 Jewish men were imprisoned, they
were released on the condition of signing an agreement to emigrate and surrender
their property (effectively guaranteeing they would never return).

This sounds horrible, but it
is worth remembering that the people who emigrated had a much higher survival
rate than those who did not. Roughly 85 percent of the 300,000 Jews who
emigrated survived the war. Of the 200,000 who remained behind, approximately
75 percent to 80 percent perished. This is the math that many members of the
transgender community are doing now.

However, there are significant
issues that would need to be overcome for this concept to be viable. Despite
being a lawyer, Davis ignores that you cannot renounce your citizenship if it
would leave you stateless. There’s also the issue of whether the Canadian
government would trust the U.S. not to renege on any agreement or
stiff them on the bill of paying for the living expenses of the people it exiles. Additionally, there is considerable Canadian opposition to increasing
immigration of “those people,” which transgender individuals certainly
qualify as, even if they do come from a country that’s culturally similar.

As someone who has become a
permanent resident of Canada, I can attest to how long and slow the process of
naturalization can be. Even for someone with a Canadian spouse and an easy path
to permanent residency and citizenzhip, it is a long, drawn-out, and arduous
process. Any sort of agreements to help usher transgender people out of the
U.S. would face significant administrative, legal, and diplomatic
hurdles. But at the same time, all of the stakeholders here have something that
the others want, be it skills, an end to the trade war, or a Reich free of Untermenschen.

I have been told many times
that it is far nobler to stay and fight than to retreat to relative safety.
This argument only makes sense if one believes that there is no real risk of
the U.S. government deciding to round up and intern transgender people under
the auspices of national security or public health. However, we can clearly see
the Trump administration laying the groundwork to do either or both. If our
perception of the situation is accurate, then asking trans people to stay and
fight makes as much sense as urging German Jews to stay and fight before World
War II. Those who fled were able to do far more 
damage to fascism in service of the United Kingdom, the U.S., and
Canada.

For other transgender people,
the idea of spending the rest of their lives going from marginally protected to actively persecuted every four years is unpleasant at best. The courts are
setting precedents that allow this targeting, and legal protections via some
sort of Equality Act that makes it through a Senate filibuster is unimaginable.
People should not have to live in constant fear of their own countrymen
electing the next fascist government, which may or may not decide to enact some
sort of final solution.

Certainly, there may be great
value in staying and fighting if either Republican restraint or the courts
would ultimately prevent the right from achieving its goal of “eradicating
transgenderism.” But right now, the polling says that probably fewer than half
of all transgender people believe that the U.S. is, or will be, a safe
place to live anytime soon.